Life Biography

With intimate detail, author Maria Riva reveals the rich life of her mother, Marlene Dietrich, the charismatic star of stage and screen whose career spanned much of the 20th century. Opening with Dietrich's childhood in Schöneberg, Riva's biography introduces us to an energetic, disciplined, and ambitious young actress whose own mother equated show business with a world of vagabonds and thieves.

Dreams of becoming the next Nadia Comaneci led Jennifer Sey to become a gymnast at the age of six. Her early success and love of the sport propelled her and her family to great sacrifice so that she could become a National Team member and one of America’s elite gymnasts by age 11. But as she set her sights higher, Jennifer began to change, setting her mental and physical health aside in the name of winning.

Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.

Philip II is not only the most famous king in Spanish history, but one of the most famous monarchs in English history: the man who married Mary Tudor and later launched the Spanish Armada against her sister Elizabeth I. This compelling biography of the most powerful European monarch of his day begins with his conception (1526) and ends with his ascent to Paradise (1603), two occurrences surprisingly well documented by contemporaries. Eminent historian Geoffrey Parker draws on four decades of research on Philip as well as a recent, extraordinary archival discovery - a trove of 3,000 documents in vaults in New York City....

Located in the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole, Svalbard is a unique archipelago that boasts stunning wintry landscapes, endangered arctic animals, and awe-inspiring natural phenomena. Since 2016, Cecilia has called this beautiful and remote location home. Along with her partner Christoffer and her dog Grim, she has adjusted to life at the top of the world—where polar bears roam free and the northern lights shine.

In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author’s identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author’s name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, he finally tells her story.

In 1931, a young American named Victor Herman accompanied his parents to the Soviet Union, where his father was to set up a Ford Motor Company plant. In 1938, he was inexplicably thrown into a Soviet prison. It was 45 years before he was able to return to America.

Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names resonate across thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended the Roman republic, their lives still haunt us as examples of how the hunger for personal power can overwhelm collective politics, how the exaltation of the military can corrode civilian authority, and how the best intentions can lead to disastrous consequences. Plutarch renders these history-making lives as flesh-and-blood characters.

18 and Life on Skid Row tells the story of a boy who spent his childhood moving from Freeport, Bahamas, to California and finally to Canada and who, at the age of eight, discovered the gift that would change his life. Throughout his career, Sebastian Bach has sold over 20 million records both as the lead singer of Skid Row and as a solo artist.

Bert Kreischer doesn't know how to say "no." If he did, he wouldn't have gotten himself mixed up with a group of Russian mobsters on a class trip to Moscow, earning him his nickname: "The Machine." He wouldn't have wrestled with a bear or swum with sharks on national television. He wouldn't have (possibly) smoked PCP with a star of Saturday Night Live. And he wouldn't have been named the Number One Partier in the Nation by Rolling Stone, inspired the movie National Lampoon's Van Wilder, or performed standup to sellout crowds across the country.

Martin Short takes you on a rich, hilarious, and occasionally heartbreaking ride through his life and times, from his early years in Toronto as a member of the fabled improvisational troupe Second City to the all-American comic big time of Saturday Night Live and memorable roles in movies such as ¡Three Amigos! and Father of the Bride.

This book not only covers the highlights of Lou Reed's career but explores lesser-known facets of his work, such as his first recordings with doo-wop group the Jades, his key literary influences, the impact of Judaism upon his work, and his engagement with the LGBT movement.

If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as flamboyant in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Millay was dazzling in the performance of herself. Her voice was likened to an instrument of seduction, and her impact on crowds and on men was legendary. Yet beneath her studied act, all was not well.

The acclaimed biography of the early church's greatest evangelist, the Apostle Paul. Master storyteller John Pollock makes Paul and his amazing story freshly alive, so that you can know the greatest apostle much as Luke and Timothy did as they traveled with him. As you listen, you'll sense Paul's motives, his aims and priorities; what mattered to him; and what he was willing to die for.

In the snow country of Japan during World War II, we meet Morie Sawataishi, a fierce individualist who has chosen to break the law by keeping an Akita dog hidden in a shed on his property. By the time of the Japanese surrender in 1945, there are only sixteen Akitas left in the country. The survival of the breed becomes Morie's passion and life. Devoted to the dogs, Morie is forever changed.

In beautiful prose that is a joy to read, Sherrill opens up the world of the Dog Man and his wife, providing a profound look at what it is to be an individualist in a culture that reveres conformity, and what it means to live.

Drew Afualo is best known as the internet’s “Crusader for Women” and is at the head of a new generation of entertainment’s rising stars. Loud is part manual, part manifesto, and part memoir. It makes it clear that behind her fearsome laugh is a mission and a life philosophy, a strategy for self-confidence from the inside out, and a pathway to once and for all remove men from the center of how women and femmes think about themselves.

The Tangled Web tells the dramatic story of detective Richard Cain's criminal career as revealed by his half-brother, Michael. Cain led a double-life—one as a well-known cop who led raids that landed on the front pages, and the other as a "made man" in one of Chicago's most notorious mob families.

Why we think it’s a great listen: You thought he was a stodgy scientist with funny hair, but Isaacson and Hermann reveal an eloquent, intense, and selfless human being who not only shaped science with his theories, but politics and world events in the 20th century as well. Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos.

Aristotle Onassis was a born orator, and Jackie Kennedy would sit and listen to him spin off tales and stories - often racy - by the hour. A speaker of seven languages, he could keep a dinner party of some of the world's most sophisticated conversationalists spellbound. Even Jackie couldn't help but drop her reserve and laugh with him. America's First Lady simply never knew anyone quite as free or exotic as Aristotle Onassis, a paradoxical blend of raconteur and ruffian.

When Martha Stewart was under investigation for insider trading and later on trial, the media served up countless gratuitous stories describing her ornery character. Now, Lloyd Allen, Martha's old friend and neighbor, is out to set the record straight.